Capt. Richard Warfield
Richard Warfield came into Maryland in 1662. He seated himself "in the woods" west of Crownsville, in Anne Arundel County, on land that reached down to Round Bay of the Severn. Where he came from and who his parents were are not known.
Over the next forty years he gathered a run of tracts. The county rent rolls list Wayfield, Warfield's Right, Hope, Increase, Warfield's Plains, Warfield's Forest, Warfield's Addition, Brandy and Warfield's Range under his name. A rent roll was the proprietor's register of land, kept because every tract owed a small yearly quitrent to the Lord Baltimore.
In 1670 he married Elinor Browne. J. D. Warfield, in his 1905 history of the county's families, calls her "heiress of Captain John Browne, of London." Hope and Increase, two adjoining tracts deeded in 1673 to "Captain John Browne, mariner, of London," came into the Warfield holdings through her.
In 1675 Richard and Elinor were summoned as witnesses in the chancery contest over the will of their next neighbour, Nicholas Wyatt. Chancery was the province's court of equity, which heard disputes the ordinary courts could not settle. The papers of 1679 in the same case name the couple "Richard and Elen Warfield."
In 1689, the year William of Orange took the English throne, Richard signed the address to King William as a military officer. In 1696 he was returned as one of the vestry of St. Ann's Church at Annapolis, "before the first building was completed," the 1905 history says.
"In his old age, he began the first westward movement of the early settlements to the unexplored frontier of Howard," that history goes on. Howard was the upper part of Anne Arundel, later a county of its own. A photograph of a log house on Warfield's Range carries a caption calling it "150 acres gift from Richard Warfield I to daughter Rachel and husband George Yates (1703)."
He made his will on 10 January 1703/4. He named his sons John, Richard, Alexander and Benjamin, and his daughters Rachel, wife of George Yates, and Ellinor. "To son John and hrs., 'Warfield's Plains' and 180 A., 'Warfield's Forest,'" the printed abstract reads. Ellinor was to have the dwelling plantation while she stayed unmarried. John and Richard were executors, and Alexander and Benjamin overseers. Overseers of a will were men named to watch that the executors carried it out. "Dying at an advanced age, in 1703-04, he left an intelligent will," Warfield wrote. It was proved on 11 February 1703/4.
That year his sons, as executors, resurveyed Warfield's Range and increased it to fifteen hundred acres. In 1705 a Richard Warfield had the history of Hope and Increase entered again in the county books, after a fire burnt the land records in 1704.
His children were John, Richard, Alexander and Benjamin, and the daughters Mary, Rachel and Elinor. Mary, the wife of a Captain Howard, was dead by 1704. Rachel married George Yates in 1700 and died in 1709. Elinor married Caleb Dorsey of Hockley in 1704 and lived until 1752. Benjamin married Elizabeth Duvall in 1705 and died in 1717.
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Cite: Heirology, "Capt. Richard Warfield (d. 1704)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/capt-richard-warfield-1704-e576e6.